Sarah Grace White introduces new single, “Sinkhole.” Coming from a musical family, White always sang, and was encouraged to harmonize at all costs, or “find the middle,” as her mother used to say, leading to choirs in school, then bands, even a stint of Bulgarian throat singing. Like so many kids, White would sit on the bus with her iPod up to max volume, fixating on artists like Fiona Apple and Radiohead, later PJ Harvey and Roxy Music.

In her hometown of Los Angeles, White started a career as an actor, but found a dissonance between the art she wanted to make and the kind of workforce she began to enter. “I didn’t feel good at the entire environment of it, but I wanted to create, and I knew I needed to find my own way in.” Throughout this exploration, White was simultaneously, though secretly, exploring music – writing in her room, singing in the car, jotting down lyrics and phrases at odd moments, but afraid to commit to music publicly. Music kept gnawing at White until a natural breaking point – “the need overcame the fear and it felt harder to ignore it than to just do it.” White’s best friend gave her an ultimatum just a couple years back – sing or stop talking about it.

White chose to sing. She took a handful of songs to friend Jorge Balbi, a pro drummer (best known for his role in Sharon Van Etten’s band) and mixer but never a full producer for another artist. The two spent weeks compiling sounds and inspirations – The Durutti Column, Talk Talk, Kate Bush, The Blue Nile, New Order, and newer artists The Weather Station and Westerman, noting “music where you can hear the negative space, and you feel it in your whole body” – before starting work on White’s debut EP, Are You Here This Time.

“Sinkhole is a story of falling in love fast with a dead end train. I wrote it in the aftermath of its inevitable crash, finding solace in some imaginary place where it all meant something after all, a physical manifestation of synchronicity. Could it be while I’m thinking of you, you’re thinking of me too?” The chorus lilts with hope and desperation – “Somewhere out in black space / There is a mountain shrouded in green / Where the lovers think of each other / At the same time.”

Inspired by classic ‘90s music videos, French new wave, and California’s varied landscapes, the “Sinkhole” video, directed by Caroline Falls, unfolds the story of a sinkhole at the beach, and where it might take you if you fall in. Falls comments, “It was definitely a little on the nose to make a video about a hole for a song called ‘Sinkhole,’ but I don’t think there was any way around it. The lyrics to this song tell such a beautiful story, and to depict anything other than that story felt like a failure. The director of photography, Yoni Shrira, and I played with shooting on tape and super 8 to really give these dueling ‘worlds’ (I like to think of them as alternate realities) their texture.”

Order “Sinkhole” by Sarah Grace White HERE